simavr is a software simulator for the AVR line of microcontrollers. You might be asking why anyone would write this sort of thing considering the simulator provided with AVR Studio is a wonderful tool? Well, a lot of folks don’t run Windows and don’t wish to use that development environment even if Wine or Virtualbox could make it happen.

We haven’t tried it out ourselves yet. There is a discussion thread going that reports some positive results of using simavr with GDB and AVR Eclipse. It’s a new package, but so far it seems to have put its best foot forward. Currently there is support for ATtiny25/45/85, ATtiny13, ATmega48/88/168, andATmega164/324/644 chips. Several of the common on-chip peripherals are already supported with the others on the way.

Have you tried it out? Let us know what you think in the comments.

[IC Photo]

Atanua is a real time logic simulator to help people learn some of the basics of electronics. Focusing mainly on logic, as opposed to power, this is a fantastic tool to learn with. They have done a fantastic job of making it easy to use as well as good looking. We can see this as being a must have piece of software for any hacker. There is a free version available as long as you aren’t using it commercially.

[Thanks ellisgl]

We were pretty excited by the prospect of location-aware software and its ability to pull map data into its functions, but what do you get when build software on top of a map-based service? Well, one possibility is 2D gaming on real maps.

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